Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

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A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.

Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.

Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though… well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!)

It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely…

“in your skin” doesn’t NEED to be taken literally to mean in your skin CELLS. Store the encoded DNA in a spare cardiac cell or neuron, and this weird shedding worry is nonexistent. The DNA is still secure “in your skin,” but it’s not sitting on the suface of your epidermis ready to flake off either.

PhudScience

You want to put DNA in a neuron or a cardiac cell? How would you access it? With a virus? with oligonucleotides? with anything useful? How are you going to “access” the information encoded in a sequence you can’t get to? with an epic zinc finger? No scientist in their right mind would ever pursue this project, because it’s not a good idea(logically).

samiscurves

Wouldn’t they just have to use a needle? A simple noninvasive procedure, if done correctly. No one ever said scientists were logical when it comes to this kind of study, they will find a way to progress.

Ben Morrisson

Well that seems short sighted… as already stated in the article it is low read/write technology… convenient access is not really the point… storing your whole medical history (scans xrays medications test results that can be recovered and decoded without you being conscious? perhaps) or a coupled with a dermal coding device that then stores ever bit of your external experience in a spot of skin?) .. the mind boggles… and since when do scientists not pursue ideas cause they are not logical… happens every day… in my work I pursue a lot of ideas cause they are ‘cool’ or ‘neat’ or ‘clever’ someday someone might find a practical use.

samiscurves

Not necessarily if it acts like a tattoo and goes through to the dermis, creating scar tissue around it.

disqus__commenter

You could encrypt the data prior to storage in your skin. Then, you have a standard key management problem, not a skin shedding problem.

PhudScience

there is no such thing as encryption of the data in your skin, unless your talking about heterochromatin, at which point your argument breaks down.

dandruff

you have no idea what you’re talking about

John Flerianos

hey bro, not everyone’s a computer scientist, take it easy on the guy!

Eggie Nogginhew

There’s harmless ignorance, and there’s the conviction that the present level of knowledge is exclusive and sufficient. That guy has illustrated the latter.

I think what disqus suggests is a good idea. By encrypting the data using normal computer encryption algorithms (truecrypt) on a normal computer, and THEN translating the encrypted data into DNA molecule form, any molecules that you accidentally shed will only contain the encrypted data. So anyone picking up the shed cells would be able to get the encrypted data out of them but they wouldn’t be able to decipher that data without having the key.

PhudScience

that would be the most expensive message ever.

http://twitter.com/RattyRy ryan howells

How would it cost any more to truecrypt a message first. I can do that for free on my laptop here.

PhudScience

making the dna into your abomination of a message, putting it in a biological setting, hoping it doesn’t get mutated, chopped, diced, or spliced, and then sequencing your abomination. can we get this kid a science book please?

captbuzzkill

Mutated? I suppose it is possible, but no more so than in any other case of mutation.
Chopped, diced, or spliced? Unless we are talking about meiosis–and gametes–I don’t think this is much of a problem.

http://twitter.com/RattyRy ryan howells

Lol! But how would encrypting it make it any more expensive than what it already is

http://twitter.com/RattyRy ryan howells

PhudScience…your a c0ck! Have you not got anything better to do than check this page every few hours to troll

dandruff

lol

Grant Fischer

computers used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars…give it time

Nick C

People that argue without the background knowledge that 2 minutes of wikipedia would give you depress me.

Joe Rollo

I will most certainly enlighten you with your naivety!

“It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely…”

I don’t think this statement was supposed to be taken literally. The author simply states that it is “worth noting” that it’s possible to store data in the skin. It IS “worth noting” because that is a pretty cool and interesting fact to the average reader, AND that CONCEPTUALLY it would be a “fantastic way of transferring data securely”. The subject of the article wasn’t about storing data in one’s skin so therefore this statement should not be taken literally. It seems like you have a background in science, and it’s probably safe to say NOT Journalism. Right? See what happened here? You were so quick to prove the author’s statement wrong, and hit us with all these science factoids, when your lack of English/Journalism knowledge led you to believe that this statement was meant to be taken literally.

PhudScience

It would be great if we could turn allmof waste into pure energy directly. That would be awesome!
Sent from my iPad

samiscurves

They are tying to erase mutations, correct? I mean that is wha this study is about. Storing data in the individuals to genetically in DNA, to delete harmful mutations, and create perfect DNA, ruling out natural section, and weakness. This is huge. They didn’t mention nano technology in this case study. I’m interested to see the progression, of this. I don’t disagree or agree with this study only because of the positive and negative doors it opens. But it will happen no matter what is said, I think people should focus on the possibilities this study will open up, rather than argue about who is smarter.

dandruff

No, this study is not about trying to erase mutations. IT is about storing binary data in DNA using the 4 base pairs.

samiscurves

Ok to store information about what? And for what reason then? Is it to store data about the subject’s reaction to the implanted DNA, or is it to track the subjects DNA cycles? I’m just curious to the reason beyond simply storing information.
Thank you for your response, this is very intriguing to me. :)

Samantha

Jacob Heckman

Sorry but you sound like one of those conspiracy theory lunatics, quit reading into the article! This is simply a research Project into finding a way to store information without needing thousands of HDD’s.

I swear how dense can you be!

disqus__commenter

I’m a month late, but it should be pointed out that there are different meanings to secure transport. In this case we have a short term covert channel of encrypted data without key information. In other words the presence of the messenger implies the message to the intended recipient.

Guest

I think you’re all missing the point that they aren’t using actual DNA here, it wouldn’t be copied or even accepted by your body in any way, it’d be destroyed. Any cell you put it in would be destroyed or die (DNA is a cell’s underlying “programming” that makes it work in the first place, you can’t just throw some DNA into a cell and expect it to go about it’s business). The only way it would survive would be if you put it in a container of some sort (not savvy with human implants, but a silicon casing or something that the body wouldn’t attack would work). You wouldn’t need to encode it either as the person trying to steal it would have to literally rip the implant out of you, just have it implanted somewhere discreet and you’re golden.

http://Spaceghost.github.com/ Johnneylee Jack Rollins

I can also just not encrypt anything ever and keep my storage media all shoved up my arse, your point?

AverGo

You’ve already, got a few secrets up there…me thinks…

PhudScience

did you put your self at the top of that list? because I suggest you get off wikipedia now and get a science book.

dandruff

I suggest you read. Something.

PhudScience

your ignorance is exhausting, your knowledge meager, and your logic childish. I suggest you read up on whatever it is you attempt to proclaim, and then maybe you can defend your points better. I just pointed out your holes in your logic, and you retreated to name calling. I’m really just trying to help you from looking like an idiot if you ever attempt to discuss your thoughts with anyone face to face, because that could get embarassing for you.

dandruff

Then would you please explain why you are dismissing plausible statements with such camaraderie and
blissful ignorance?

PhudScience

Your statements arent plausible. Thats why im dismissing them.

Sent from my iPad

Kyle

Jesus tap dancing Christ some of you people are so fucking stupid it hurts me to read your words. Clearly PhudScience has little to no understanding of what he’s talking about, but the general lack of understanding for both computer & DNA high-level concepts is sad. If you don’t understand what’s being discussed here, that’s fine but go be ignorant elsewhere. Don’t post up your ignorance as fact and confuse the short-bus people that read this.

you pointed out nothing. from teh looks of things you have some awareness of the biological aspect of this discussion, but are computer illiterate, or you would have understood that there is absolutely no difference between encoding an encrypted or unencrypted message PRIOR to moving it to whatever organic medium is under discussion, and the cost of encryption is negligible.

Dimitri Loginowski

I agree with the rest of the people who are offended by your arrogance Phud .You clearly had no clue about software encryption. The suggestion is absolutely spot on. You seem to be versed in biology only and have no clue about IT so why don’t you drop the condescending tone and admit that you were wrong. It would be a much better indicator of your intellect.

TexasLadyJuanita

Pun? LOL

http://www.achraf52.com Achraf52

You are not going to store data on yourself, you would buy a tiny device that has DNA along with all electronic that could perform the operation .

PhudScience

no, this would not work like that.

Mark Way

Yeah, i dont think their talking about storing it in yourself. The DNA with the specific data could exist within a secure small mobile device, much like a USB drive.

PhudScience

no, not true. this would not work

John Flerianos

what’s the point?

Vikas Gupta

wait, you’re saying that they would take this and put it into the DNA in your skin cells and somehow your body would replicate it across all of the skin cells in your body?? That’s not how it works. If you were to put DNA in the nucleus of a cell, it doesn’t mean it will get picked up during cell mitosis. Also, injecting one cell out of a trillion will not mean that cell will somehow magically divide and take over your whole body.

some_guy_said

It would either be in your cell nucleus or it would be stored in a container within your body. If it is just freely floating out there, it would be A) hard to find, and B) It would get mopped up by the body’s antivirus defenses.

Obviously, the body doesn’t like foreign DNA. And with no protective protein covering like normal viruses, your data would be open season for T cells and the like.

PhudScience

no this wouldn’t occur, you would have to put this DNA into the stem cells of your body, all of them, for it to be replicated, as your terminally differentiated cells would just die off and would carry that message to their grave. and no, the DNA would get picked up during mitosis, if it’s chromsomally integrated, as a plasmid, possibly, you should read up on exosomes in the nucleus, a recent Science paper will enlighten you.

Eggie Nogginhew

Whoa, whoa, whoa. As a complete layperson in the areas of biochemistry as well as information theory, I’m able to (just barely) theorize where they’re going with this. No one is saying that adding a crapload of synthesized DNA pairs to a cell will result in that cell incorporating the DNA into its own native DNA, or will even result in a functioning cell. It’s just to be used as storage. Point-based, encrypted data (with the encryption occurring before the bits are ever converted into DNA pairs) is being placed in a spot on or in the body to be referenced later. That’s all.

Your reaction to this stuff is akin to akin to shooting down quantum computing because they won’t be producing pure molybdenum in the process. Or something. I’m an internet ogre, not a physicist.

PhudScience

just trying to help everyone out, naivety is good for creativity, just not for proclamation. dna computation is cool no doubt, but the harvard paper is essentially useless.

http://profile.yahoo.com/QNSQUU3DAHWBDVXHPKAWXWUECI Alex

correct me if i am wrong, but i understand that it’s not the DNA that needs so much care with storage as your enzymes or proteins. since these guys only care about dna to store information, isn’t it quite versatile to use? why do we need skin cells, etc.? dna can exist by itself.

The last of the original article stated that using skin cells to transport data is technically possible, and would be “secure”. My comment was based solely on my doubts as to that hypothetical security relative to other mediums.

I didn’t say they would be inserting the DNA containing the message into the nucleus. That would be foolish in the extreme when they could store it in a vesicle outside the nuclear membrane.

However, injecting one cell “out of a trillion” would require the person receiving the message to find and sequence that ONE cell- assuming of course it didn’t shed- a one-in-a-trillion possibility. Indeed, no matter how many of those cells you make, if you’re altering skin cells you have to face the fact of skin cell shedding, which could complicate the alleged security this would offer.

That is what I was saying.

some_guy_said

Or what if your data gets cancer?

GhostyToasty

Your comment made me smile.

As other have stated, they’re not trying to change a /person’s/ DNA. The body would kill it, it would be too hard to find, ect.

There’s talking about taking DNA /strands/ (e.g. tiny tiny double-helix strings, like in the picture) synthesizing them from scratch (don’t quote me on that) with custom TGAC, and using them in small storage devices, like a usb drive.

PhudScience

not true, the you can change the dna and still have the cell stay fine, otherwise, how would you explain cancer. or silent mutations.

http://twitter.com/preetiaahir Preeti Aahir

They are not talking about integrating the encrypted data into the cell’s DNA, thts not how it works. To integrate DNA in human cell is a whole different argument however its not related to this. They will encode the data in form of DNA, synthesize it invitro and put spot the microfuild on a chip or on a biologically degradable device. you could wear that as gloves or something, u can engulf the titanium capsule with DNA and it wil in your stomach.

PhudScience

Synthesize, this abomination in vitro, and put it on a spot. Fine. Now what, how are you going to access the information encoded in “1’s and 0’s” and do something meaningful in biology? Or meaningful with electronics? Or anything meaningful really. I’m going to wear a glove of DNA, and access it with a magical device that is clumsy and inaccurate? The only reason everyone got hot and bothered over this articles is because they think they made a DNA computer, when all they really did was make a ton of DNA, and call it a computer. You want actual DNA computation, which is MUCH more interesting, checkout Benenson/Winfree/Pierce/Seeman, then at least you’ll see my point.

dandruff

To put it bluntly, your comments are quite frankly, the literary equivalence of valium. It’s obvious to everyone now that you really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

“.. do something meaningful in biology/electronics.” Wow, really man? You are truly out there aren’t you?

Think about the modern transistor. It started off as just another “useless” invention, with no practical use for around 40 years.
And in that time period, there were people just like you. Who were just as ignorant, just as pompous. Who shot down
this “abomination” of an invention, scoffing, “this is absolutely useless, the guys who made this are dumb?”.

You know what? Transistors are now used literally everywhere. The reason any consumer electronic device exists today is because of the discovery of transistors.

The inventors of the transistor could never have dreamed that their inventions could have brought this much innovation and
this much change to the future.

In short, do not laugh at the technology you face today and deem them useless. It’s very, very childish and is a kick to the balls for the Harvard scientists (not that they would listen to you in the first place). Keep your mind open and appreciate the advances of modern science.

“the only reason everyone got hot and bothered over this article is because they think they made a DNA computer”.
Okay, hold on there. What the actual fuck? No sir, only you could have conjured THAT up. Now you’re just pulling things out of your butthole. NO-ONE in their right minds would have thought that! The whole raison d’etre of this article is about the possibility of STORING DATA in DNA.

“when all they really did was make a ton of DNA, AND CALLED IT A COMPUTER”
Yeah..okay, you’re retarded.

Also, cancer is a defect of DNA that affects cell division, and viruses affect cells by getting through the cell wall, and highjacking your DNA/RNA. So, you’re still wrong anyways.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1174483066 Tod Faasse

Cancer is not genetic. Less than 3% of disease is genetically correlated.
97% of DNA activity is photonic. Chemistry can not explain the majority
of functionality in a living cell. Chemistry is too slow. This
discovery supports the new science of Intelligent Design. Obviously
there is a script that is written. Also keep in mind the Genome project
was a complete fail. The real brain of the life process is found in the
functionality of the membrane. If you remove the DNA from a living cell,
it can do everything it did before except reproduce. In short, the DNA
is the gonads of the cell. The key is in protein synthesis- see
epigentics. BTW great artic

smithers

Actually, it was RNA enzymes that started everything, These RNA enzymes were catalytically active, but also stored information. However, they were like any of the hybridized consumables we use today (mediocre at everything but not great at anything, i.e. generalists). Hence, the evolution of DNA for information storage, and Protein+RNA containing enzymes, or ribosomes, which read that information and synthesize the proteins necessary for reproducing that information stored in DNA. Though I agree, membranes make it all that much more feasible, lol.

I don’t believe storing information as ones and zeroes is anywhere close to being as elegant or versatile as the triplet code, combined with epigenetic code and all the other modifications that continue to be discovered (siRNA, miRNA, snRNA, Posttranslational mods, etc.). We are on our way though, pioneered by these wyss institue types.

PhudScience

no, no, and no. your data can be mutated, it can’t get “cancer”. your cells get cancer when they mutate a very important set of proteins and your immune system doesn’t clear the cell. you should look into antisense/siRNA technology, or Erik Winfree at Caltech, or Yaakov Benenson, as this will help you clean up your analogy, but no, there will be no “software” maybe if nucleic acid therapies can end up working, maybe.

Bilal Moore

My understanding is that cancer is a far more common ocurence than we know. That if effects every kind of cell and very often . I think the only way for this to work for more than a few seconds, and the data to not be corrupted and destroyed is to rewrite an individuals dna to support the new data, or to rewrite the data to be compatible with the users dna/rna. Or possibly to use a virus like hiv, herpes, or the common cold. to preserve the data against the assault from the immune system. Or maybe use a fungus? after the data is transferred, one could just take antibiotics?

PhudScience

You have the right mindset. The problem is that when you put anything in a biological setting, or at least anything made of the same material as that biological material, i.e. DNA, you subject that object to the pressures of evolution/selection/mutation. So, re-writing it into a different material will only prolong the problem and will never escape the inherent problem which is the scrambling of that data(DNA) by the biological system. If however, you could come up with a novel genetic system, THEN, this could be very cool as you would have orthogonal systems, the problem now is the replicative potential of your alternative genetic system, which would mean…unfortunately, you would have to create life from scratch, and then interface it with your desired biological system. very very difficult. but good thought process.

kartik venkat

they are NOT storing data on any actual human cell DNA (skin or otherwise). the main breakthrough is the ability to synthesize DNA strands for a specified “sequence of base pairs”. in nature, DNA molecules have a remarkably compact structure, while they represent billions of bytes of data (namely our genetic code).

via this process, scientists have managed to take an insanely huge amount of bytes, and compactly store it in a DNAesque molecule. this new molecule is only structurally similar to human DNA molecules. think of it as a really small flash drive. it probably has nothing in common with the dna in your skin.

Theo Morton

Was meant to be hypothetical at this point. Not literally “in your skin”.

Marko

In a broader sense, store data can also mean some kind of literal immortality: life(s) experience(s), recorded and stored, being passed from body to body (be biological or cloned or artificial, or a mix of all), or even other type of living support units.

http://profile.yahoo.com/P7DUWEJOUSG4ANZEAQ6HKCEBB4 Abdullah

If in the future the project succeeded and was able to store data in the human Gnome, wouldn’t that require to sequence the human gnome to match specific sequence for the data?

yes. you would sequence the particular region, not the entire genome. it would be nearly impossible to put all of this DNA into a cell with the current technology.

Andre Dias

This is the coolest thing I ever saw in extremetech!

some_guy_said

Not after you realize what the average “seek” time is…

You’re looking at a magnitude in the order of 10 to the power of 6 or 7 milliseconds. (1 to 10 Million millisecond seek time…)

Eric Brickley

IT’s being touted as long term storage, not Random Access…

some_guy_said

I’m comparing it to HDD seek times, RAM seek times are not measured in milliseconds…

http://twitter.com/wwbrannon William Brannon

but HDD seek times aren’t the right comparison. Retrieval time from a long-term magnetic tape storage facility is a better fit

some_guy_said

Magnetic tape storage is slowly fading away for the same reasons that this technology is *Currently* impractical.

Magnetic tape rolls can have a seek time of up to a minute, which primarily makes them only useful for archiving.

This much DNA could literally take the better part of a year to find the piece you need. It would only be useful if you need a large chunk of data archived that you never need to revisit for individual parts.

But more importantly, DNA currently requires conditions far too specific to ensure data integrity over long periods of time.

Without very specialized measures, it will only last a few months at the integrity you would want.

The best way to ensure that DNA lasts a long time is to freeze it in a cryogenic solution. However, thawing and freezing damages the DNA. You would need to rewrite the data often if you need to access it.

I’m just pointing out, that DNA as it stands has only very limited applications, and would need multiple major breakthroughs in multiple areas to become broader in scope.

Kyle Patnode

DNA will survive in a standard fridge just fine, there’s a few of them
not 10 feet from me. And sequencing does not take years, whole genome
sequencing can be done in less than a week. Even better, if I only want a
specific spot, sanger sequencing doesn’t take long assuming I have the
right primer (which I very well could if I’m using them as an indexing
scheme for this type of storage). I’m not saying the problem is solved, but it’s hardly insurmountable. Just a matter of time.

some_guy_said

appreciate the recognition of the other comment about the size of the data here compared to the amount of binary data that can be stored in a human genome.

I’m assuming that the idea would be to use this on an archival time period of years or decades. notwithstanding the cost to refrigerate something that long, how long would the DNA last appreciably if it was just chilled in the fridge?

Kyle Patnode

Dunno what the cap on it is but I know ours is still good (in the normal fridge) and I believe the oldest in there is 4/5 years, not to say it can’t get older, that’s just where it is now. In a -80C that stuff is supposed to last forever. For comparison, one could consider that there are 5 (partial) Neanderthal genomes sequenced and that’s quite a bit longer than anything you’d need.

PhudScience

No, it wouldn’t take a year to find it, you would sequence it. the dna is very stable, so you’re wrong there. and no, if they were to put the DNA in cells in how they claim it would be useful, the cells would propagate the genome, including the data.

jacoblowe2dot0

well if the sequencing time went for years to hours in a couple years imagine what speeds will be like in a couple years. I could see alot of data being stored in cache and memory, because really how often do you access a petabyte of data all at once.

some_guy_said

With state of the art technology, you can fully sequence (With a number of errors) A full human genome in about 2 weeks.

You can sequence a gene in a few hours, not the entire DNA strand.

The human genome is approximately 3 Billion base pairs. Using it as binary
storage, this equates to about 375MB of storage for one DNA strand.

Now, let’s assume that in 20 or 30 years that we can sequence an entire Human DNA strand can be perfectly sequenced in 1 minute.

Then it will still take 4-5 YEARS to sequence 700 TB of data…

PhudScience

exactly the reason why what they did is completely useless. if biology was this inefficient we wouldn’t exist, biology was smart enough not to deal in ATGCACTACTA as 1’s and 0’s like these harvard kids

PhudScience

no, you can’t sequence the shit real time you have to isolate the cells, this will never be a computer, this is just an overly expensive way of saying we put a ton of sequences into something, and if we sequence it, what we call the sequence is a 0 or 1, which is pointless, but o well, that’s what they did

PhudScience

no, you’re wrong. the sequence gives you immediate access to what you’re looking for, this isn’t a computer.

R C

If you already know everything about this subject and no one else gives a flip what you think (as your statements seem to indicate you believe), why are you continuing the argument?

No one is arguing against your intelligence here. Unfortunately you’re one of those people who are just smart enough to be incredibly self-assured and short sighted. “Smart enough to be dumb” as someone in my family puts it.

The potential for this isn’t necessarily in the use as a storage medium, but for the fact that Dr. Church is moving toward his goals of a DNA Read/Write machine, which will open up new avenues of science in our understanding of genetics. Unfortunately, he’s ran into many individuals who are either a) smug, or b) outright laugh at his concepts due to being unable to see where he’s going with it.

Tell me this, oh-wise-one? How many developments start off instantaneously being of use and practicality? If it were that simple to expand fields of science, then we would not need to fund years of research and development toward application. This is essentially a first generation project, and one that many people told Dr. Church would be impossible.

Or go back to Tar and feathering any new-fangled device you don’t see use for. We know how important you are, internet poster, and anything you pooh pooh must be doomed to uselessness since we, as a whole of humanity, depend on you to determine what will or will not be a useful science in the future.

Well, I have a question; What if there’s data already stored on that particular portion of DNA. Could the information that was already there be decoded or is it that all DNA would qualify to be “blank slates” and could just as easily store that much potential information?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

In this case they created the DNA from scratch — they encoded binary into a TGAC sequence, and then constructed the DNA.

http://www.zachbaker.com/ Zach Baker

How did they cram all that gram?

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SOBVIV5BHPBFIZZAR35A67KRM4 FarNiente F

USB cables – (Unbelievably Small Beam cables)

http://profile.yahoo.com/32R55PLV5GNQGFKLLTTG5LMPGM John

Also, a series of tubes.

RickCJLove

I can imagine a terrible security problem when encoding raw data to DNA.

Imagine a SQL injection type attack: In the middle of some random data, include an escape sequence followed by data that would result in the DNA sequence of a deadly virus being encoded.

Now with enough knowledge about the process this could become a literal computer virus.

http://www.facebook.com/JacktheSmack Jack Cole

Viruses only would if there’s other mechanisms that can decode the DNA and form proteins and other types of molecules, and they need energy too. An artificial device that is only designed to read and write dna, not form proteins or lipids or other things, wouldn’t have viruses created by injecting a viral genetic code. It would be like putting the genetic code for HIV on your hard drive today.

RickCJLove

Still it’s an interesting idea. Putting data on DNA that is actually part of the construction process would be closer to physical reality than if the data was stored on magnetic media. Nothing would happen without further human intervention. However, I think the analogy would be closer to writing the code for a computer virus, but never compiling that code or executing it.

YupYup

The analogy would be writing a computer virus on a banana peel.. you have to change the medium entirely for the data to ever do any real damage.

Justin Wong

Accidentally encoding a blueprint(DNA) of the virus would be incredibly unlikely, but even if it did, it’s not in a vector and thus is completely harmless you’re body would eliminate it as a rogue piece of DNA via siRNA.

Not to mention the fact that even if this happened, to produce valid blueprint(DNA) which would lead to valid proteins to be folded correctly and the fact that it would accidentally have to be spliced from the rest of the storage DNA at that exact point again is extremely unlikely. (as I said in the above paragraph, if that did happen it’d just get eliminated via siRNA if it didn’t have a vector)

Chris Smiddy

I believe you have a typo.
In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.
Shouldn’t it be 700 Terabytes?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Yeah, that sentence could be a bit clearer — but those values are all correct, I think. 700,000 * 70 billion = 43 petabytes.

Josh Lowry

Doesn’t this seem like kind of a cheat, then? It’s just 70 billion copies of the same 700kb. Making copies of short pieces of DNA is easy; we do it in our lab every day. This would be much more exciting if they had encoded an entire library into that much DNA. This is more like a library with 70 billion copies of one book.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

I guess — but I think it’s more a matter of… they had to find 43 petabytes of data — so why not just copy the book over and over? They still have to encode/decode/synthesise each time.

http://profiles.google.com/jesset Jesse Thompson

A better option would be to encode X terabytes of data (700? 4300? this part confuses me) from a mathematical formula which outputs (virtually) endless unique data, and you can quickly check the data at any given address.

Simplest example would be something like counting upwards from zero in 27-bit unsigned integers. :3 Choose a bit-size for your integers which *does not* match a common factor or multiple of your packet size, so that boundaries commonly lie on different packets (like real data would) and to minimize patterns which could provide false positives in the test.

rrllbb

They said a 19 bit adress, that means 525000 individual strands. They also said 96 bits per strand. 96 times 535000 comes to about 50 million. That’s bits, which is about 630,000 bytes. Where is 700 TB coming from? Am I missing something?

Derek Whittom

a 700 terabyte book?

700 kilobytes is what was meant.

aidanjt

That’s fantastic. But there is a problem, DNA is really fragile. Much more fragile than a tape. So if long term storage is the goal, they’re going to have their work cut out for them to add extra error correction and redundancy.

Superabound

Im not sure what you mean by “fragile”. My DNA seems to still be working fine, whereas every tape i ever owned was eventually shredded by my car stereo.

aidanjt

Right, but you have 100,000,000,000,000-odd copies in each cell. Even if one cell’s nucleolus is damaged, or even outright obliterated, there’s cells surrounding it ready to multiply and take its place. So nature works with extreme redundancy and constant replication with error correction mechanisms.

goat_with_mange

2 copies in each cell….

aidanjt

You’d probably have a little trouble typing on a 105-key keyboard if you’re just 2 cells.

goat_with_mange

your comment: “you have 100,000,000,000,000-odd copies in each cell”
I think you’ll find you have 2 copies of your genome in the majority of your cells.

aidanjt

You misread. I said 100,000,000,000,000-odd copies in each cell, in the same way you find warmth in fire. That doesn’t mean you need to be standing in the fire to receive warmth. The context was obvious.

goat_with_mange

Nope, try again mate. Still wrong.

Context may have been obvious in your muddled brain, but the aim of writing out your message was presumably communication, and you were definitely not clear. You never specified what there were “100,000,000,000,000-odd copies” of within each cell. Note that you said “in each cell”. Unfortunately, your “finding warmth in fire” analogy is confused and meaningless. Again, you fail as a communicator. So let’s try to talk specifically.

So, what are we talking about in the cell that has “100,000,000,000,000-odd copies” and is meaningful in terms of DNA sequence error correction and redundancy, which is what you were discussing. There are not “100,000,000,000,000-odd copies” of any DNA sequence in the cell. If you’re talking about a distinct gene, there are 2 copies, 1 on each chromosome. If you’re talking about a unique intergenic sequences, you still only have 2 copies of it, ignoring the factor of genomic deletions and duplications. If you’re talking about a repeat sequence, such as an Alu, then there are approx 1 million. So, you’re only off by at least 1 million orders of magnitude there!

If you were attempting to refer to the number of copies of the human genome in the body, then the estimate is 10 trillion cells, so 20 trillion copies of the genome (assuming all cells are nucleated). So you’re still off by a factor of 5, but that doesn’t matter, since you said “100,000,000,000,000-odd copies in each cell”, which was the point I was correcting you on. If you were referring to the total number of cells residing within a human, you might have been confused by the 100 trillion number, which is thrown about when talking about the estimated total human (10 trillion) + bacterial (100 trillion) cells in the body. But you were also referring to cellular regeneration after damage-induced apoptosis or necrosis, which only occurs in complex multicellular eukaryotes, i.e. human cells and not the bacterial cells. Anyhow, in terms of this type of regeneration, a neuron can’t replicate to repair the loss of a cell in your kidney or toe-nail, it can only occur in restricted proximity. So those large numbers of cells available for repair don’t work in this regard. Not to mention that many somatic cells are post-mitotic (like those neurons). Additionally, in terms of long-term maintenance of a genome sequence in mammals, only the genome in the germ cells matter, which are far less numerous. So, still still no luck finding an interpretation in which you were right…..

Anyhow, that would all be stretching your comment too far. You were specific that there were “100,000,000,000,000-odd copies” of the unspecified species “in each cell”. So what in each cell related to DNA is there 100 trillion copies of?

Let’s assume you were talking about individual deoxyribonucleotides rather than a contiguous sequence of DNA polymer, which is required to hold information. There are 3.08 billion bases in the human genome, so with 2 copies of the genome in each cell, that gives 6.16 billion base pairs, or 12.24 billion individual nucleotides taking into account the double helical structure. Nope……still nowhere near “100,000,000,000,000-odd copies in each cell”.

In short – you’re a muddled moron.

http://profile.yahoo.com/NGNH74BWH5352LDB73FCBOY3YE JOHN

“that gives 6.16 billion base pairs”,
616 = what some call the true number
of the Beast in Revelations. I’m not
saying that this is relevant to this, I
just have these odd bit’s of info in my
brain.
I know this science is relatively young
but if they can store all this info on an
organic system such as strands of
DNA, surely at some point they will
be able to connect a human to a
computer matrix, maybe they will
have to “design” a new human being
in order to take advantage of this
knowledge, but surely I can’t be the
only one to have thought of this!
Sometimes we think it will take many
years in order to accomplish such
incredible feats, often to be proved
wrong in a relatively short time as
we understand the science of it better
and make huge leaps as scientists
and ordinary people, have more
access to information via the internet
etc.

SirClueless

Also, when you have 70 billion times redundancy, error correction is less important.

disqus__commenter

70 billion copies is only error resistance in a limited sense. Error correction is not a bad thing to have, since this is intended for long term storage. Let’s say you store your gelatinous blob in a plastic can in the closet. How does it get affected by the environment over time? Perhaps, mutations/degradations would be similar for all strands, or randomly distributed among ALL strands? The count of data strands won’t make any difference then.

You want to avoid someone with a blowtorch destroying all the data, so keep copies in different locations.
And remember to encrypt the data prior to storage.

Now, it would cool if key separation were used, so you mix two blobs (with two pieces of key material) and one part encrypted data blob to get your stuff. After sequencing, of course.

Genetic_dude

No sequencer ever produces a perfect sequence from a piece of DNA. You would have to sequence the same piece of DNA several times to get a reliable DNA sequence. This takes weeks and costs thousands of $$$. Still sweet though.

Superabound

You run into the same problem with magnetic data storage (solar and cosmic radiation can flip random bits), which is why all modern storage techniques uses redundancy and error correction algorithms.

YupYup

simple error correction techniques can be employed here…

JohnC238

I find it interesting that they took a base-4 storage system and only used it as a base-2 storage system. Proof of concept though, bravo for them.

http://profile.yahoo.com/4CTPNOMDQU7M6UPJN6MLYVEL74 The Jesus

Binary is base-2, that would’ve required inventing a whole new system for storing data.

Grayson J. Stedman jr.

They could easily have converted the data into Base 4 before encoding it. That would probably double the storage capacity. When read it would simply be converted from Base 4 back into Base 2 (Binary). Or just do a straight conversion to Base 10 (Decimal) in order to convert to ASCII to read the data. All depends on the type of data. But it would be very easy to do.

James Thomason

It would do more than just double the storage capacity: it would square it. A single bit would change from being able to be 0 or 1, to being able to be 0, 1, 2, or 3. A byte–or 10 bits–would then change from having a maximum value of 2^10 (1,024) to 4^10. (1,048,576)

I think he was alluding to the fact that if they have 4 units why not store data in base 4, and I think the answer has to do with the way the bases can and cannot be combined.

Sara Steele

Yeah, I’d say while DNA does have four bases, whenever you find it in stable (double stranded) form you have them paired lawfully A with T, C with G. So unless you were going to have a way for recognizing which strand was the “read” strand (I forget how our cells do this) it’s better to treat the system as binary, so that each strand translates to the same thing reversed. There are people trying to develop higher base DNA (ie DNA with 5, 6 or more base pairs) but I think in the context of protein synthesis, not straight up data storage.

Sara Steele

Yeah, I’d say while DNA does have four bases, whenever you find it in stable (double stranded) form you have them paired lawfully A with T, C with G. So unless you were going to have a way for recognizing which strand was the “read” strand (I forget how our cells do this) it’s better to treat the system as binary, so that each strand translates to the same thing reversed. There are people trying to develop higher base DNA (ie DNA with 5, 6 or more base pairs) but I think in the context of protein synthesis, not straight up data storage.

http://profiles.google.com/jesset Jesse Thompson

Or you could sacrifice one code point at the beginning of the strand as a marker in order to double the density for the rest of the strand.

Say the first code point is always “A/T”, then you carry on using A=00, T=01, C=10, G=11 on the A side knowing that will encode as T=00, A=01, G=10, C=11 on the T side.

On read, you check that first base pair to see if the side you are reading is an A (first lookup table) or T (second lookup table). Job done, 2×-1 storage space ahoy. :D

Kyle Patnode

With the binary system instead, they could vary the DNA a bit to prevent things like high GC content, homopolymer regions, and secondary structures which are notorious for messing up sequencing.

http://twitter.com/nijialagua nijialagua

is it possible to read the data stored in DNA using our own brain instead of pc ?
it would far more interesting ,isn’t it ?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Our DNA is fairly standard across all of our body! The brain is all about neuronal connections, hormones, etc.

Cody Turner

That would be literally break though technology. imagine if you could store music in your own body amazing is what that would be!

goat_with_mange

gibberish

Ed6759

OK, synthetic DNA. What a concept. Now, consider this: NATURAL DNA activates or deactivates every function that our bodies have, as well as configures the organism’s attributes. By introducing a synthetic version of DNA into a living organism, one could, theoretically, alter the sequence of the Natural DNA already there, It probably wouldn’t take much, but, the most disturbing thing about all of this… do we really have enough knowledge, fore-thought, and moral maturity as a race to even contemplate allowing someone to introduce this synthetic stuff? Sure, this may sound all ‘Sci-Fi’ and even a bit surreal, but, what would happen if someone decided that they wanted to create a real ‘Manchurian Candidate’ through the utilization of synthetic DNA? If they can now store that much data in just a gram of this stuff, might it be possible to also encode certain sequences, which when activated, could in short order alter the Natural DNA? Anyone could be made victim to this kind of thing by just going and getting an annual flu shot from unsuspecting doctors using Synthetic DNA tainted serum. Maybe I’m a bit paranoid, but considering the current global state of affairs: Euro taking a nose dive; Mid-East conflicts; Global climate changes; OVERPOPULATION; amongst countless other situations, could a less than honest group, or government for that matter, decide that, in an effort to further their own agendas, they might use just such a device? Worse yet, if any of the above is even possible, what better way to reduce a surplus population. All that would be required is to introduce the synthetic DNA encoded in such a way as to create a new Bubonic Plague or some other horrendous malady into society. Of course, this could also occur by accident, but, when was the last time someone with an agenda ‘accidentally’ tried to push it forward? Here’s food for thought… “LIQUID HUMAN” – just add synthetic DNA.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

In short… we’re a long way away from inserting some custom-made DNA into arbitrary human cells. We’re getting there, with gene therapy… but probably a few more years yet, until your vision comes true :)

GatzLoc

There’s no surplus population. Be on guard everyone.

RolyVento

This sounds like a great Sci-Fi series, I will watch it! Reminds me of Battle Star Galactica!

All great scientific achievements were once considered science fiction or simply as “magic”, curiosity and imagination have been invoked greatly in this article, enjoying the read.

GhostyToasty

That’s extremely silly, but good for a sci-fi!

Maybe you should write it! :D

goat_with_mange

By synthetic DNA, they simply mean that they used chemical reactions in a tube to make it, rather than relying on biological systems such as polymerases. It’s still the same on the molecular level, but assembled in the sequence you want.

We’ve been able to create custom DNA sequence and introduce it into the genome of an animal/plant/bacterium for years now. Viruses have been able to do this for a lot longer.

The really scary thing would be if the “agenda” bogeymen used it to eliminate manic paranoia and all the protective benefits it engenders.

http://twitter.com/viciouzex Joseph Fernandez

If they use AAC it will store more.

http://twitter.com/getfinderous Get Finderous

Sooner or later, we will all realize that the genes in our bodies are the data that somebody wanted to save for years to come and then read it back when the time is right.

YAWN. This is pure hype meant to bedazzle lay people who know nothing about science.. First off, a gram of pure DNA is a LOT of DNA. Secondly this is all very theoretical. No technology is close to implementing DNA as a storage medium. Most likely our civilization will collapse long before we have the ability to store episodes of Louie on our Tivos.

johnathan blaze

That is, most likely our civilization will collapse long before we have the ability to store episodes of Louie on our Tivos using DNA..

http://profile.yahoo.com/244AZXOM3QVEZ2G57QDARJGSVA Rubius

You still have a TiVo?

http://twitter.com/mikematheson Mike Matheson

Boo! Go pee on another parade, Debbie Downer!

GhostyToasty

That’s a tad juvenile, even if it is tongue-in-cheek.

EEKman

Moores law would like to have a word with you.

http://profile.yahoo.com/V3WUUBG66FA47MUO4RKAZSIEFA TheSecretArts

Murphy would like to have a chat as well.

http://twitter.com/17_brock Brock Robinson

Has anybody tried scrubbing the human genome looking for pictures or words?

Maybe somebody already figured this out and left us a lengthy message?

GhostyToasty

There would be a lot for problems regarding not having the appropriate compiler to interpret the code. There’s not really going to be a universal interpretation of bits, especially if we’re not the ones who put the code there in the first place.

goat_with_mange

if they left a message in your genome it would say: “hey brock! you’re a fucking moron. quit the creator day-dreaming gibberish and leave the thinking to people who don’t just pull ideas out of their rectum”

we already know that genomes contain “words” (insofar as a word is a string of information that holds a particular meaning when read by a particular process…..e.g. a gene, encoding a protein)……but none of them were written by your big invisible daddy-o sky wizard

https://profiles.google.com/114370234029494390041 Joshua Baker

Then where did such an intellectually structured concept of storing information originate? Do you think that out of the great many combinations of information, it popped up in just the right conditions and was sustainable throughout our “assumed” ancient history? And if that’s the case, did all this simply come from nothing?

To believe that requires you to ignore the design of the genome. And for there to be a design, there must be a designer.

goat_with_mange

What is an “intellectually structured concept of storing information” and how does it relate to the human genome? Sounds to me like you’re starting your argument with the assumption that this form of information storage is intellectually designed.

Stop using ambiguous descriptions like “design of the genome”. Explain specifically what you mean by that. Otherwise it sounds like completely unsubstantiated nonsense to me.
I don’t see a genome that is riddled with millions upon millions of parasitic replicating elements as particularly well designed. It works though, which is enough to continue its existence.Anyhow, I’d love to hear more about what aspect of the genome shows its design? Cause I’ve never seen any, and I’d hazard a guess I’ve looked a lot more closely at them than you have.
Here we go with the watch-maker argument again. Boy, this has been done to death…..the tired old argument trotted out by simpletons who haven’t bothered to think for just a second, and refuse to listen to rational hypotheses. In the end, invoking a designer simply means that you move the problem up one step…..the designer clearly would have to have structure and form and intent of some sort (in order to do the designing)…..so who designed the designer!?!?!? The logic used in the argument invalidates itself! Just stop for a moment and think about that, without invoking some bullshit mystical get out of jail free card. As I said, it’s a pathetic argument that falls apart as soon as you start to think of it logically…..it’s a refuge for the intellectually challenged.

You also seem to forget that cellular life, utilizing the same genomic information storage system as all extant life, has been around for a LONG time, we’re talking billions of years. That’s a long time for complexity to increase.

Biologists do not claim that humans, or other life for that matter, just “popped” into existence. You suggested that. Chemical evidence suggests life has been present on earth for at least 3.8 billion years, perhaps even longer. But that doesn’t mean that it was always present in the same form as now, as is clearly demonstrated through the fossil record. Were talking about incredibly long periods of time (assuming you don’t think the world was created 6000 years ago……which may be a foolish assumption). Complexity increases, and there are plausible hypotheses for abiogenesis through far simpler molecular forms than exist in current life (e.g. the RNA world hypothesis for the origin of life). One example could be a ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecule (which are known to be able to have enzymatic activity, a ribozyme) that both encodes itself and has RNA-dependent RNA polymerase activity, which means it can make a copy of an RNA sequence out of RNA. This would be a potential start point for something considered living, it encodes itself and copies itself. Researchers quite recently (2011 I think) evolved a synthetic ribozyme that is able to polymerize an RNA of ~90 bases. So there is growing experimental evidence that a scenario like this could have taken place (cause we’re getting closer to replicating it in the lab today, from scratch).

Just go read a bit more, there are a lot of well-reasoned arguments by people who just want to know how things work…..the magical sky wizard is such a dull, logically-flawed, and boring point at which to stop your questioning. The models of the world that people are putting together from actual data and experiments are far more interesting and wonderful, in my opinion.

Howard Yanna Jr

You could be right…there is no God. Then again, the only other 4-element existence I’m aware of is Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (as comparable to the 4-nucleotide basis for all DNA/RNA encoding; A, C, G, & T).

Each to their own, but we all have to choose: WE are CREATING the science (to which I ask, ‘How were there things like Earth, Air, Fire and Water BEFORE humans existed?), OR someone/something else created this stuff before humans existed, and the whole of “science” is simply humans LEARNING how CREATION was done? Either way, we are still only learning how…not why. Maybe, as you believe, there is no “why”. Human consciousness and all other things we cannot explain scientifically “just happened” through the processes of complete inter-dimensional randomness. To believe this, in my opinion, is to believe that your life and your very existence means nothing at all. That must be overwhelmingly depressing. To be the only known creature in the whole of existence to have a conscience and opinions, only to believe that everything you do during your time on Earth is meant to rot away with your body, leaving not a passing memory behind.

It sounds uncannily like you do not believe in “God”. For your souls’ sake, I pray you are right. I believe in God. If I’m wrong, my soul rots with my body like yours does.

But if I’m right…maybe you SHOULD pray now…while you still have the breath to do so! God bless you! ;)

Kevin Harper

How is it depressing to be gifted with the EXTREMELY UNLIKELY ability to observe this existence for a short but amazing time. What would be depressing is if there was an all powerful, all knowing, and all loving entity who thought humans were so lowly that they weren’t even worthy of loving. I hope you can fill the fear you have for death with something other than ‘god’ because as you lie there praying that there is a heaven and all the doubts of your life flood into your mind evoking thoughts of Hell (why would such a place even exist if there was an all-loving god?) fill your conscious with a deep sense of foreboding, our little goat with mange will lie there smiling at the wonder that was this short, unimportant life.

Justin Wong

You can actually do this, we did this in a computer science assignment trying to find sentences in the human genome, and in short in can find any sentence you want because you want it to be there? Our task was to find the best/longest sentence that made sense.

Depending how you decode it. I mean it’d be full of gibberish but it’d be more like MUMuhetoahp(c{}&+]g)pcroahutensohauteshc{}+&]SHOULDphc.ruhetnmjtnshceshacrypls}h){+;huceBRING.cr,;lfgyc)r.phjmbkjq’zvm[hptnshtMEuhtkmjq'vbxmjns;c)}g(+{gyhcsatuensoaBREAKFASThut{&])gypcr}huatenoautensoINhtnsmbt}nsbmtpns}b{t;sychao+]l)gkerolhkensohatunesBED.

and you might interpret that as “mum should bring me breakfast in bed”.

So yeah you can find pretty much anything depending on how you interpret and decode the data. you could find “religion is false” “kangaroos is god” “42 is the meaning of life”

Bobby Ryan

How do we know that knowledge hasnt been stored in us that way before now? I believe that the memories of every living creature are stored within us.

Mike

Because that’s nonsense.

GhostyToasty

But technically not impossible.

GhostyToasty

That would make a cool sci-fi.

goat_with_mange

Please see my reply to Brock Robinson, above.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that you’re not talking about cellular components that are highly conserved throughout the kingdoms of life, but instead are spouting some mystical gibberish that falls well within the realms of insane, and clearly shows you’re significantly divorced from reality.

WHAT YOU BELIEVE DOESN’T MATTER. Please go read a couple of books or at least some wikipedia pages on basic genetics and cell biology. Many people have worked hard to figure out how living organisms work, and we have a pretty decent idea now. It’s all there at your fingertips, for free, supported by vast volumes of reproducible experimental data. If only you would take off your bullshit-tinted glasses for an instant.

http://profile.yahoo.com/PUTVSPT6BDUNCG7DU2G3BQAR6A justin

And we thought we would have to be half-metal/half-human to be taken over and instructed to kill by the mighty Telsa Coil signal.

http://profile.yahoo.com/PUTVSPT6BDUNCG7DU2G3BQAR6A justin

Look like a human, actually robot devoid of soul, awesome.

http://www.achraf52.com/ Achraf52

If an already setup DNA is about to get full would it be possible to add more DNA to make it’s capacity larger, well let us not do the same mistake and think we could never store as much data individually .

http://twitter.com/PurpleBagBoy Mr.Scott F.Y.G

Good job.

http://twitter.com/PurpleBagBoy Mr.Scott F.Y.G

Good job.

http://twitter.com/ddlow daniel low

Simply amazing.. Congratulations to both of you…. So many wonderful possibilities, now if you can just keep the government from taking it away from you….

http://profile.yahoo.com/CZCG25JJRRT3F6SODFJ4BZY5TU a

…a few *hundred kilos* of DNA? I feel pretty safe…

http://www.facebook.com/michael.s.muirhead Michael Muirhead

You feel safe? You obviously have no idea. A few hundred kilos of “lab/factory-bio-manufactured/synthesized” DNA is only a couple of hours’ worth of today’s current global production.

Sri Kosuri

I’m the corresponding author of the paper; I think the headline might be a bit sensationalistic, as you reporting many copies of 1 book that’s only 650kB. Also, it’s a milligram, not a gram.

http://www.facebook.com/michael.s.muirhead Michael Muirhead

As one of the authors, then… have you (or have your colleagues) wondered about the possibility of simple DNA data-storage constructs being adopted by a virus and transduced to living organisms?

Sri Kosuri

yes, we have a section on safety in the paper’s supplement. a. it’s unlikely to get into a cell; b. longest aa sequence encoded is 37aa

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Hey! Thanks for stopping by.

I had a few issues with the volumes/metrics, because the press release stated one value (5.5 petabits?) while in the video Church says one zettabyte? But maybe I misheard/misread :)

Sri Kosuri

in t

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Cool, thanks for clearing that up :)

Jack Conner

This opens up SO many possibilities… and dangers.For instance, depending on how and what it will be used for, you can create:

– Unlimited data storage of absolutely EVERYTHING! Besides just making humans a walking harddrive, with the bioelectrical system we have, people may be able to record everything with their eyes (laws would change, soldiers/police would have new tools and more), and/or their personal experiences, similar to the movie Brainwaves with Christopher Walken. At that point, forget watching a porn video, why get off to it when you can get into it. Be the guy, be the girl, be both. What about those videos on YouTube or Vimeo of guys jumping off cliffs with wing-suits, others doing parkour/free-running, others still racing cars, motorcycles, etc.,? You can be a 300+lb. fat-a** and still enjoy the thrill and rush of the memory, all for a small fee.

– Knowledge transfer. Why bother with the cumbersome and time consuming lesson learning of any subject. With DNA data transfer, you can learn anything someone else who is skilled in it knows, in just the transfer a DNA interface. If it is further explored/advanced, this would include the muscle memory skills/dexterity of a particular skill set… Maybe playing piano or drawing or painting or whatever. The limitation of such would be if you were that same 300+lb. fat a** however. You might have the memory skill and instructions in your body, but until you develop the core muscles, body, etc., to handle it, it’s similar to giving a 17 year old with a new license the keys to a Lamborghini, it’s simply too much power for a weaker body and restrictions or requirements would be necessary.

– What about viruses? Worse, what about unscreened memories/emotions? You think corrupted data of your harddrive and losing all of you iTunes was ever bad? Imagine getting a bad set of memories from some chick you had sex with the other night, come to find out she’s bi-polar or worse? Not to mention other instruction sets (like a trojan/virus/etc.) which could be hidden in data packages and then released later on, perhaps targeting your own hard drive (your brain) or worse, your hardware (a command to shut your kidneys down, code written by Glaxo or Merck, because they have the cure/code to correct it)?

The possibilities are endless, but ultimately, without a world worth living in and based on the current state of things, it would be of more harm than good, regardless of how they package it as a modern convenience (the same way they did smartphones and other ‘necessities’).

I pray our spirituality exceeds our technology lest we become like the Borg or some entities in the Matrix, lying in a pod of goo. You’d never know as the data of that morbid history of when the machines took over would have been written over and into a false history… Perhaps the way it has been already… In fact, I am now in trouble for disclosing the truth.

John

http://www.facebook.com/michael.s.muirhead Michael Muirhead

I gotta figger “knowledge transfer” via DNA replacement in humans the way you propose it ain’t gonna happen, and neither is your feared “viral transmission of memories” – since our DNA is not where we store our “knowledge”.

Even so, you did at least think of what viruses might do if they were to pick up and *use* bits of DNA that we’ve simply created as binary data storage and not as intentional biological instruction.

Justin Wong

oops yeah what you said, should’ve read what you posted.

Justin Wong

Just to pick up on a couple of things.

1. Our memory and learning process is our particular brain chemistry, ie the way our neuronal cells communicate with each other. Everyone is different and creates their own neuronal network in the brain. Not much is known about our memory and learning process in terms of a molecular perspective. It’s believed that it is to do with Long Term Potentiating in the synapses which allow you to memorise and learn things. THIS is what we need to map to transfer skill sets and knowledge and then somehow fire those same neurons and replicate the same neural network in someone else. Everybody’s neural network would be different so transferring someone else’s LTP signals would not simply correlate to someone elses brain. So yeah it has nothing to do with DNA.

What I’d like to know is how likely it is that viruses (nature’s most efficient and ubiquitous shufflers of the global genome) will be able occasionally to grab snippets of this “data-DNA” and then add them as insertions or substitutions to the DNA of living critters.

John Morris

It would look like random bits and do nothing useful. But just to be safe I do wonder why they don’t just work out an entirely different chemistry for storage purposes. Using entirely different molecules would pretty much assure isolation between biology and information tech. A virus or bacteria might not do bad sci-fi movie things with data DNA but it would modify it or just eat it and that would erase the data.

AF

Quantum Computing + Organic Storage = Computers of the future

Michael Compton

What happens when my hard drive gets cancer?

Chris Stith

That their excitement is that it would enable the extreme in a police surveillance state underwhelms me with the author’s and editors’ grasp on humanity, no matter the author’s grasp on the science.

http://twitter.com/Creodyne Creodyne

Are they using left handed DNA as depicted in the cover image? If so it is a novel form because Z-DNA is kinked and that stuff is left-handed B-form DNA…. hmmmmm

http://www.facebook.com/michael.s.muirhead Michael Muirhead

Stock images are cheap and easy to find. Does it matter?

Howard Yanna Jr

Possibly. Right-twisted and Left-twisted DNA may not cross-contaminate each other well. Does anyone know this as fact???

http://www.facebook.com/michael.s.muirhead Michael Muirhead

One more consideration before we start calling this the beginning or the end of anything:

Is it *practical*? By that I mean, “are the encoding and retrieval times for such storage quick enough to matter in the data-world in which we all work today, and/or are the data thus encoded *stable* for a length of time that matters to people (say…. 100% for more than 2 centuries and 90% or better for more than 20,000 years)?”

Howard Yanna Jr

There has been partial strands of Natural-DNA found within dinosaur bones and amber-encapsulated insects from millions of years ago, not just tens of thousands of years. I speak of the differences of RAM and ROM memory and how this news applies to each in a separate, later comment.

alexandrawestwood

a-freakin-mazing!!!

alexandrawestwood

who care if it’s practical! the sheer fact that it’s possible! there are plenty of inventions/applications that were before their time we thought “so what’s the use/purpose”at the time of discovery!

I’m a lil bit confuse about the way they want to store data in the DNA of living cells. Because if I really understood (maybe I’m wrong) the date are stored on a DNA form (T and G=1, A and C=0) so this data will be automatically DNA, I guess. right?
Sounds really amazing anyway, but I wonder if it won’t bother DNA of cells of my skin

http://twitter.com/heidicando HB

existing storage devices like cell phones, tablets would be lighter. silly to store on your body unless you are going through a scanner. then it makes perfect sense to have your information stored on a tattoo. but then again the retina scanners are already taking care of some of this.

jwkrk

1 gram of DNA versus 151 kGrams of hard drive? Wouldn’t a more fair comparison be with the mass of the magnetic layer on the disks? Still impressive, though.

jim425

Securing data in your skin would stop being a good idea when the people you’re hiding it from read this article and take your skin.

Nonreproducable

Yet another case where George publishes some half thought out idea, But now everyone else who has been working in the field for years has been scooped. Can the start-up company be far behind?

http://www.postlinearity.com gregorylent

and you laughed at yogis who have talked about the akashic records for centuries …

VinceP1974

Most people don’t know this, but there is about 6 feet of DNA in most cells of your body.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000513072818 Jeremy Schnoor

1024 terabytes to a petabyte. So how could 700 terabytes be 5.5 petabytes? I could be reading this wrong, but… yeah.

PhudScience

first off, the cell “encrypts” data for just about everything. All these guys did is make a ton of DNA and assign a value to it, completely useless in terms of biology for starters, useless as a “storage” method second, and way too expensive. for actually cool stuff in terms of DNA storage/logic, check out Caltech

PhudScience

jesus, all of you have no idea what you’re talking about.

PocketG

Wow! Think about how much illegally downloaded music I could store on my butt!

Amairrr

Your hands will speak! Everything is already being stored inside you! We knew this 1400 years ago…
That Day shall We set a seal on their mouths. But their hands will speak to us, and their feet bear witness, to all that they did. [36:65]

On the Day when their tongues, their hands, and their feet will bear witness against them as to their actions. [24:24]

And the Book (one’s Record) will be placed (in the right hand for a believer in the Oneness of Allah, and in the left hand for a disbeliever in the Oneness of Allah), and you will see the Mujrimun (criminals, polytheists, sinners, etc.), fearful of that which is (recorded) therein. They will say: “Woe to us! What sort of Book is this that leaves neither a small thing nor a big thing, but has recorded it with numbers!” And they will find all that they did, placed before them, and your Lord treats no one with injustice. [18:49]
The Messenger of Allah described the questioning in a speech reported by Imam Muslim that the prophet Muhammad (Peace and blessings be upon him) said:

“Allah will meet a person and ask him: “O person, Wasn’t I generous with you, and made you with a spouse, and made the horses and camels at your disposal?

The servant will reply “yes”! Allah will then ask “Did you think that you will meet me?” He will reply: “No!”

Allah will say: “I will forget you like you forgot me”!

Then Allah will meet another person and his reply will be the same as the first person. Then Allah will meet a third person and will ask similar questions, and the person’s reply will be: “O Lord I believed in you, in your books, and in your messengers. I prayed, I fasted, and I gave charity. And he will praise Allah as much as he can.

Allah will say: “Hold on to your words, Now we will bring the witnesses. The person will ask himself “Who will testify against me?” Then that persons mouth will be sealed, and his thighs, flesh and bones will be asked to speak. They will speak about his bad deeds. He will know that he has no excuse. That is the hypocrite Allah will be furious with!”

Max Sangster

klj

RC

Because USB flash drives are so mainstream.

Ajay Kumar

cant they use TGAC as T=00 G=01 A=10 C=11

http://www.johnrockefeller.net/ John Rockefeller

What’s the read and write speed?

Howard Yanna Jr

Your question assumes a RAM-memory device. Since the DNA-memory is made of nucleotides (nucleic proteins abbreviated as A, C, G, & T), the memory referred to is almost unquestionably ROM-memory. That is not to say it ‘could not’ be RAM, but it’s highly unlikely.

This extrapolation relies on the differences between the physical realm (nucleotides) and the realm of forces (electromagnetics[EM], gravity, photometrics, etc). Forces are much easier to manipulate & reconfigure (increase/decrease intensity of EM force, change electron spin/parity, photon manipulation at the speed of light, etc.) versus changes to physical configurations (swapping nucleotides).

However, just the opposite is true for durability: Forces can degrade over time and lose the information it stores, where physical objects are much less likely to degrade to the point of losing the information it encodes.

This is surely a great technological advancement for the permanence of information. Not only can it store huge archives of information is very tiny spaces, the information is difficult to corrupt once encoded. Space ships, space stations, & satellites, stores of biologic DNA sequences, encyclopedic and reference materials, and any other need for static information will benefit exponentially from this accomplishment.

We will still have to wait on the advancement of photon transistors to increase the ever-changing data we consume on a daily basis.

Kmperl

Article did say, “
DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage”

http://twitter.com/Jabberwockxeno Jabberwock xeno

“In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA “

So it is 700 KB, or 700 TB?

http://www.nleomf.org/officers/ FlatFoot

But will it run on a MAC?

http://profile.yahoo.com/2UHPCHFPPL3OSIFUXSXP4PSMPQ 4merCIA

The author of this article only said that it would be a fantastic idea to store it in the skin, he did not say that it had been determined that it would be feasible. Besides, most of the things that we assert today, will be debuked a few years from now, just like so many other things in science/technology.

Robert Frano

To paraphrase the ficitional Vulcan scientist-diplomat, ‘Spock’, (played by L. Nimoy), all I can say is: “Fascinating”!!

This reminds me of all the ‘Sci-Fi’ speculation of my youth, where the issues at hand revolved ‘round the longevity of human civilization / It’s artifacts…
…Artificially / intentionally, rather than biologically- / geologically-accidentally created ‘fossilization’, in effect!

There IS, sadly, always a potential ‘police-state’ aspect to all this scientific advancement…In this day / age where it’s reasonable to consider how the NSA / other corporate-governmental-national-security-spying / agencies / efforts include the ability to monitor all email’s, stuxnet, etc.

With ‘Stuxnet’, I was reminded of the criminal, (R.M. Nixon’s), alleged comment that, “If the president does it / authorizes it, it isn’t a crime”;
…Or some such (‘sociopathic’) nonsense!

That noted…
I am ALSO reminded of the, (‘overly-reliant-on-cheap-CGI-animation’), show ‘After humans’, (I might be incorrect, re ‘title’), explores, within a 1-hour format, various speculation(s), re what the earth & human artifacts, post humanity, will be like, at (various), 5, 10-25, 50-year / multi-century intervals…

I prefer to ‘always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life’, to borrow from Erich Idle’s / Monty-Python’s musical prowess!

Robert Frano

To paraphrase the ficitional Vulcan scientist-diplomat, ‘Spock’, (played by L. Nimoy), all I can say is: “Fascinating”!!

This reminds me of all the ‘Sci-Fi’ speculation of my youth, where the issues at hand revolved ‘round the longevity of human civilization / It’s artifacts…
…Artificially / intentionally, rather than biologically- / geologically-accidentally created ‘fossilization’, in effect!

There IS, sadly, always a potential ‘police-state’ aspect to all this scientific advancement…In this day / age where it’s reasonable to consider how the NSA / other corporate-governmental-national-security-spying / agencies / efforts include the ability to monitor all email’s, stuxnet, etc.

With ‘Stuxnet’, I was reminded of the criminal, (R.M. Nixon’s), alleged comment that, “If the president does it / authorizes it, it isn’t a crime”;
…Or some such (‘sociopathic’) nonsense!

That noted…
I am ALSO reminded of the, (‘overly-reliant-on-cheap-CGI-animation’), show ‘After humans’, (I might be incorrect, re ‘title’), explores, within a 1-hour format, various speculation(s), re what the earth & human artifacts, post humanity, will be like, at (various), 5, 10-25, 50-year / multi-century intervals…

I prefer to ‘always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life’, to borrow from Erich Idle’s / Monty-Python’s musical prowess!

http://profile.yahoo.com/25IKRBPIX5LA5ARNCH5KR2TUVQ Samael13

who says your skin is secure? (or mine for that matter?)

Bilal Moore

I think the best way for this to happen would be to use DNA that is not acually apart of someones body though, or maybe use cancer cells, or a tumor. But I have a crazy idea, not really related. What if we could use a brain, of any kind really, as a CPU? that would be pretty awsome.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Arnold/1259562281 Jack Arnold

Yes, that’s sounds great. When can I have my universal translator please? Need it bad.

http://twitter.com/JeffreyMCollins Jeffrey Collins

The idea of storing data in your skin, makes my skin crawl. EEEK.

David Govett

Since most of our genomes consist of so-called junk genes, perhaps those are actually encrypted, broadband information stored by aliens long ago. Perhaps not.

Can you imagine everyone one of us walking around with 1,000’s of terabytes of information stored in our DNA, and ready for use at anytime?, We would all have IQ’s in the thousands…

http://twitter.com/seskvipedalian Ivan Petrovski

Wow, I hope they don’t use the DNA to store this comment thread.

http://www.cgi.com Martial Van Neste

Humm, Joe Davis Bioartist had such an idea in 2000… : “His latest idea is to put a map of the galaxy in the ear of a mouse, inspired in this project by a children’s story an ex-girlfriend wrote eight years ago. He has taken the map of the Milky Way and reduced that information to sequence of 3,867 DNA base pairs. He has an agreement with Millenium Pharmaceuticals to synthesize the DNA sequence in 100 base pair chunks.”http://tech.mit.edu/V120/N26/bioartists.26f.html

http://twitter.com/burrkitty Erin Miller

Gattica. Creep factor is high. DNA is programming code for life. Using it as a storage medium is scary. What happens when it is read, not by a sequencer but by a living organism’s system? WARNING: May cause cycles or multiple cascade paths and death if swallowed… (shudder)

Adam Stackhouse

Somewhere, Keannu Reeves is reading a movie script….

MIT_kid_2009

This is a pretty misleading article and headline. The paper details writing 5.27 megabits of data (about 600 kilobytes) onto DNA, with a density of 5.5 petabits per gram and only about a dozen errors. There’s still a long, long way to go to get from single strands to useful amounts of data with minimal errors. The fact that storing data in DNA is feasible is still exciting.

Jason Gilliland

Why couldn’t 1 base pair contain 2 bits?
A: 00
C: 01
G: 10
T: 11

http://www.movies-suck.com/ Wastrel Way

I read another article by Susan Young (http://www.technologyreview.com/profile/susan.young/), and that question was also asked. She said: “There is a practical reason. Certain strings of nucleotides are
troublesome for synthesizers and sequencers (e.g. strings of repeated
sequences or a very high percentage of G-C pairs in a piece of DNA can
be difficult to read).” In other words, reliability. Fewer read errors.

http://LeadByGreatness.com David Lapin

Fascinating to see how previously siloed disciplines are beginning to synthesize into a unified, integral truth.

datagod

Some of you are likely wondering if a computer virus somehow gets written into the DNA of your skin cells, whether you would get sick from it. The answer is yes. A person CAN catch a computer virus this way, and the major symptom is extreme gullibility.

http://profile.yahoo.com/ZOGJQDSMMY2VOQF2RLKO6QZG5I cf8

If you took 50 micro SD cards, 64GB each, then I’m pretty sure you’d be able to fit more storage into the same space as a 3TB HDD…

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=765058178 facebook-765058178

Awesome.. may be oneday we can store all the stuff in our own DNA in our own body and not worry about lot of things? This is a great achievement and breakthrough

tim ramich

A fine article outlining a cool discovery, and then THERE IT IS…an agenda…”Today, we wouldn’t dream of
blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every
moment for all eternity/human posterity.” Which means: “now we have the technology to blanket the earth with cameras and track and record everything everyone does as a futile attempt to make life fluffy and wonderful and to try to make sure nothing bad ever happens again (because people want to be socialists and not own up to being an adult and the consequences of one’s actions).”

danno415

Information technology is building Big Brother, no doubt about it, but not sure why you fear socialists more than a right-wing police state.

http://twitter.com/lapidb Ben Lapid

Exactly how long did it take us to sequence the human genome? I’m just a bit skeptical as to how swiftly we can read the data in the DNA.

http://twitter.com/Saikron Saikron

All I got out of this article is that PhudScience is incompetent.

Rob Stutton

To compare this with hard drives you have to consider that hard drives provide not only the storage media, but a means to access the storage and store both media and mechanism in a robust case.
With DNA, you would have to consider the access mechanism, which is how big?
Nonetheless, a promising development.

Lee A. Miller

Finally…a data storage device large enough to store human patterns so we can start beaming instead of flying…

Sean Coker

I am actually using this paired with quantum entanglement, cloud storage and grid computing as a basis for a sci-fi short story I’m writing for school.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Sounds cool :)

DesertSun59

Well… we’re just a few steps away from encoding new lifeforms!

http://www.facebook.com/JevonHayter Jevon Hayter

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NM2000

I want.

John Paul Quitoriano

Ok i want one, i want an encrypted Magneto Mutant DNA, and mount it to my brain so that i will become a Magneto Mutant.

Sofia Paxton

DNA as just another digital
storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions
on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are
synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value
(T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

Storing DNA data on a skin? One might get skin allergy due to that.LOL

http://profiles.google.com/enigmav8 Chris Kleczynski

I don’t get the point of this though. Okay the potential to store obsurd amounts of data in a tiny space. Only one problem… DNA is VERY volitile and fragile. Unless it’s kept frozen maybe, but even then. Biological material on it’s own is not meant for long term use. Whether you believe in Intellgient design or not…the point is the purpose of DNA is simply to be a pattern for frequent replication due to its volitility, not as long term, stable storage. It’s against everything for which DNA is purposed.

While quite fascinating and awesome from a scientific level… nothing to see here…move along. Please procede to the next exhibit: Quantum Storage.

http://www.facebook.com/maybury.james James Maybury

Actually as the article comments “where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.”
Yes there are conditions for keeping it stable but as forensics and palaeontology have shown we can extract DNA from old crime scenes and even from Neanderthal remains, so thousands of years even when not deliberately trying to keep it. I suspect sealed from water and oxygen is all it needs (like in amber, “durasic park” did use some science amongst its fiction) .

Mohd Hafiz

We can call it stupid when somebody want to put an unknown kind DNA under your skin. If you do that, you may die or changed to something unknown. It is DNA. Your body may interpret this DNA as some programming codes. Do you intent to program yourself, where the programming codes is yet unknown?

What they want to achieve is data sustainability. When you can duplicate this DNA until in the end of the world. Not about the coolness for copying the DNA. It is stable. you can guess dinosaur DNA.

Nowdays hardware had limitation. Destroy your hardware, your data will lost. But by this, your data can be copied for a long time, as DNA can be easily duplicated. As they manage to put binaries, so any kind of encryption is possible as long they are using binary as base. Think like your computer, they use binaries to work.

joosef

The article makes no reference to storage, copy, and load times. How fast can they then sequence this information. Storing it in such a small space is nice, but if it takes multiple days to store or access the information, it’s essentially useless.

Dillon

And I thought my 1 TB hard-drive was pretty big for storrage

http://www.facebook.com/marcel.vandersluys.3 Marcel van der Sluys

Still it is pretty smart. What if the DNA resulted in an organism. Humans carry about 3GB in their DNA which would make those creatures 200.000 times smarter/more complex than us. Just Imagine ;-)

This is amazing. A few more jump ahead in tech and you should be able to extract your biologic info and link it with a 3d printer and maybe you can replicate yourself. Of course that 3d printer has to take a few steps forward.

http://www.facebook.com/maybury.james James Maybury

As DNA is base 4, why not store the info in base 4 for even higher density, not hard to translate. How did they store the DNA strand, can they get it to supercoil around histones like biological DNA?

Guest

what about mutations then??

http://www.facebook.com/koilakanthos Antonios Marmarinos

What about mutations then..could a dose of radiation from example a cell phone destroy all the data?

It is certainly a very interesting fact that DNA can store such an enormous amount of information. And this using a binary digit based language. What I guess, is still similar to writing the sounds of the Chinese language using the English alphabet. Another really great step in this research field would be to crack the code of DNA and find a way to read and write it using something similar, in terms of userfriendlyness, to a typewriter. What would require an enormous amount of knowledge and processing power, in a level we are not any close. Back engineering based on DNA is a very hard task. In some aspects, It can really be like people from the middle age trying to develop an atomic bomb by watching an atomic blast. I know It is probably an exaggeration, but I guess you can understand what I wanted to say here.

grevyturty

Is negro DNA less efficient for storage, since they are different, bizarre and inferior in a lot of ways? (Last time I checked, Africa didn’t exactly have a space program LOL)

Oliver

This will only work for large volumes of information without the need for consistent reading and writing.
Feel sorry for the lab technicians that would need to synthesize and sequence information every clock cycle of a 2GHz processor that reads/writes to its DNA Memory bank.

In any case, biology has the ultimate physical architecture, flip flops and magnetic strips have nothing on it.

Jonathan

Interested in the fact that they only stored 1/2 bit per base pair (on average, if T and G = 1, A and C = 2). Would like to see what they could do with one bit per base pair, or even two bits per base pair. (ie, A=10, T=11, C=00, G=01) Seems doable if they can separate sense from anti-sense. Wonder if any physical or logical limits come into play at this point.

Nano Nymous

First, the illustration is wrong – it shows left-handed DNA while real DNA helix is right-handed. Second, this sounds like a VERY expensive way to store information: The cheapest commercial DNA synthesis right now is $0.01 per single base. One base molecular mass is ~ 330. That means 1 g is ~ 0.003 moles, meaning 6×10^20 bases to synthesize (Avogadro number of bases in one mole). How would you like to store that 1 g of information for million times the size of USA GDP? Even if synthesis costs drop down 10-100X (can’t be less than that because chemicals need to be made and they need to be pure enough) that still would cost a lot more money than we all combined will ever have.

First of all, if you had some data that you wanted to be sure would survive through the ages what if you embedded the modified DNA into a living creature that you were sure would reproduce (along with your data) and survive well into the future. Say into a cockroach.

Second, has anyone thought about looking in places like that for this kind of data?

If, for instance, some other civilization had visited us sometime in the distant past and they wanted to leave a message for any advanced civilization that might one day arise that might be a good way to do it… a lot more reliable and with far greater capacity then carving on a rock!

As I said off the wall but…

Tajas

This is how real dumb guys react to such a brilliant achievement.

neoeno@nonoe.com

I always hear stories like this, but the real question is when and where can i buy it

neoeno@nonoe.com

I always hear stories like this, but the real question is when and where can i buy it

eldigato

now in the future i can actually store all my god damn porn

http://www.facebook.com/rachel.stevens.9887 Rachel Stevens

Cant read every thing . But if u were to transport people u would use 50 to 100 million terabites to send a man 150 to 300 lb a hard drive of 1tb cost 100$ so for 1billion $ we should be able to save someone for eternity to be copied leater

http://www.facebook.com/Anthony.S.Ries Anthony Ries

Wow sounds like some real geniuses commenting here. lol

disqus_C9gUsp8hRL

There are two errors here: DNA can carry two bits of information per nucleotide, not one. And DNA cannot last “hundreds of thousands” of years in a box in your garage. It may possibly last up to 250,000 years in sub-zero storage, but it will be riddled with errors.
Read Kimura and Paabo respectively.

Doc Brown

We need to go back to the way things were on November 5th, 1955. That’s the day I invented time travel.

WhatsNext

We soon shall have DNA disc readers

http://www.facebook.com/ross.grammoh.poleice Ross Grammoh Poleice

I’d be interested to see what would happen if they interpreted the human genome in this way.

Mark Kirkham

The problem with skin storage is its short term. The body is in a constant state of change. so much so that the body we had 7 years ago is gone. seems our body shed its atoms like snakes do their skin. We get a new one as stated above every 7 years. is not science great!

Muhammad Awais

Wow… someday we won’t even need computers. Our eyes and brain power will do that all for us. I am really excited even to think it that way. Ah, our descendants won’t admire these things as much we will do, if we achieve that technology today.

Roland Goldberg

Oops, misread petabits as petabytes… Speak in terms that people know -.-

Richy Norman

In summary ,that my friends, is some pretty awesome chit…..

TexasLadyJuanita

Isn’t God just the smartest? :)

disqus_this

Don’t you mean Darwin? After all, we are Monkeys 3.0………..

TexasLadyJuanita

At the bottom is a button that says, “Load more comments” and I laughed and said to myself – not on your life. LOL Geeeesh Cannot anyone just read the article, visualize, and appreciate? With such naysayers, my thankfully non-scientific-mind just sees possibilities as He gave us all of creation to play with, and America would be in such better shape if there were more like me that just sat here and thought of the good possibilities.

Robin Ankrett

am truly amazed at you all, yes its a debatable subject with skin storage but not one of you is amazed at the design of a simple DNA strand. you sound like blinkered race horses.

disqus_this

In the meantime…… it would take 6-weeks to retrieve the text for this article…… haven’t you read any article that the DNA evidence will take 3-6 weeks to process??

dizz guszz

Wow, isn’t this a nightmare for data recovery the moment a dna stand is unreadable or gets accidentally misplaced? Whoops…there goes…700 terabytes of data?! No thank you!

Just need to sequence it … not as simple as it sounds. The standard methods of DNA sequencing rely on the fact that much of the genome is not repetitious. Regions that are can’t be sequenced reliably.

Joseph Lee

SideTrack: If DNA storage could last hundreds of thousands of years. If I am an alien and would like to “ingrain” some information for the (future) human-race; where would be the best place for me to store them? In OUR gene… I think some data-scientists should take a serious look at the “useless” stuff in the Y-gene … Maybe some pattern might emerge that yield some interesting information.

http://www.korioi.net/ Korios

I really wonder how fast is “fast enough”. Magnetic tapes currently have the largest capacity by they suck at random access time, which can be entire minutes to access a particular part of data. Presumably this tech will not have similarly serial access, but it can be designed with random access in mind, like flash memory. Even if the bandwidth sucks, if the random access time is in the order of single ms it would then be reasonably practical.

Now if only we can buld a mashine like the “Animus” in Assassin’s Creed, that can read our DNA and reconstruct the memories of our ancestors. That will be interesting. ;)

Kazem Spahi

And the Book is placed, and thou seest the guilty fearful of that which is therein, and they say: What kind of a Book is this that leaveth not a small thing nor a great thing but hath counted it! And they find all that they did confronting them, and thy Lord wrongeth no-one. (49) Surah Al-Kahf (from the Holy Quran)

Guest

Does anyone find this passage from the above article at all disconcerting: “Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity” …As if lack of storage is the problem with covering the totality of the planet and all that lies therein with absolute surveillance?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/member.php?u=5800648 Gazzasore

Surely the NSA has some type of super storage right now ,Or how could they store all Data transmitted

Marko

In a broader sense, store data can also mean some kind of literal immortality: life(s) experience(s), recorded and stored, being passed from body to body (be biological, cloned, artificial, or a mix of all), or even other type of living support units.

John Stark

Nano saturated particles with Metelyn(Bee Venom) inserted into Blood stream..Instructed by binary encoded DNA..Able to magnetically release the Metelin to kill HIV affected cells in the body to shut down HIV replication at a cellular level! Use a MRI unit to impose the Magnetic field resonance causing the nanoparticle to do thier work as instructed by the Binary instructions in the DNA! (just saying this would be a idea of optimal use. transport effective treatments to cells and then tell the carrier DNA to instruct the body to
do a corrective allignment of the chromosomes or damaged cells.)

http://localancers.com/ Localancers.com

Wow!
Imagine to hide such an info into a human.
It will be a bit hard to find 8-)

willie199120

Couldn’t they have increased storage capacity by having each protein match to a different sequence? I.e. T=00,A=01,G=10,C=11

Austin Wilkins

Why are they using Binary when they could be using base 4? Seems like low hanging fruit in terms of compression. Since it’s already accepted that the process takes a long time, it seems like it wouldn’t hurt to add just a little more time and convert back and forth from base 4, giving you exactly double the storage space. 700 TB becomes 1400 TB if I’m doing that math right.

http://www.fickenin.berlin/ Bonnie Pfotenpuff

Cool – so I’ll be able to store all my videos and music in my hamster ;)

Guest

You stole that joke :D.

http://www.fickenin.berlin/ Bonnie Pfotenpuff

That was me too ;) I never steal jokes.

Guest

No. That was me too. I never steal jokes ;)

Guest

No. That was me too ;) I never steal jokes.

JamOneSha

So, why is this a big deal? Since you have to sequence the DNA to read the information, it is not exactly a rapid means of retrieving data. How long would have to wait to read from a particular area of the DNA memory? How do you handle the inevitable N’s from the sequencer? This is not at all practical.

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